The race for the future of search has been a heavyweight battle between two giants: Google , the undisputed champion, and OpenAI ’s ChatGPT, the rising star. On one side, you have the company that’s defined online discovery for two decades. On the other, the buzzy AI that promised to change everything. But in a surprising turn of events, it appears the rivalry isn’t as straightforward as it seems. In what’s being called the ultimate tech plot twist, a new report confirms that ChatGPT has been secretly using Google’s own search results to power its answers.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still using Google Search to answer your questions
The irony here is hard to ignore. For months, OpenAI has been pushing ChatGPT as a legitimate rival to Google Search. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has even claimed he no longer uses Google. But according to a report from The Information , OpenAI has been relying on data scraped from Google Search through a web-scraping service called SerpApi. This data, which provides real-time information on everything from news and sports to financial markets, helps ChatGPT answer questions its own systems can’t handle with the same accuracy or speed.
This is particularly interesting because Google had previously denied OpenAI’s request to directly access its search index. This fact was revealed by documents from an ongoing antitrust battle. Despite this friction, OpenAI still rents servers from Google Cloud to run its own operations. This development proves that business practicality can override a competitive feud.
The revelation of the scraping service, however, adds a new layer to the story. One former Google engineer even created dummy web pages that only appeared in Google’s search index. Then, when he later asked ChatGPT about them, the AI responded with information pulled from those very pages.
Google’s search engine is still miles ahead
So, why would the fastest-growing tech company in the world resort to this? Because, as one OpenAI executive admitted in court, they’re nowhere near their goal of powering all of their search results from their own web crawler. ChatGPT has a huge user base, but it still pales in comparison to Google’s massive scale. The Mountain View giant still handles over 5 trillion searches every year. Google’s search index, built over two decades, remains the foundation of online discovery.
The big takeaway from this tech drama is simple: Google’s search index is still the gold standard. Even OpenAI, its biggest AI search rival, has been leaning on it to power its own product. If Google’s results are valuable enough for the most talked-about AI on the planet, then they are absolutely essential for any business trying to drive visibility, traffic, and growth online. This is yet another reminder that SEO isn’t going anywhere just yet.
